Mask work is another workshop we have done. The masks we were all different there were a variety of emotions which we had to try and match with our body language. First of all we were given a piece of music and we all had to create a wedding scene. This was helpful as we could focus more on our body language than expressions. We were then put into groups, We were quick to decide our scenario, that of a late night in a bar. We assigned ourselves characters; there were two drunken friends,a barman, a creep trying to hit on a girl on her own in the bar. We created a scene around these characters to the song of  Chelsea Dagger. We created an effective performance that was simple yet affective it used the simple principle of not breaking the illusion of there being a mask and a face and just a face.

This added to my sills as it showed that my actions can speak a thousand words and also that my body language is just as important as facial expressions.
I like this kind of work but im not Shaw I would choose to do this again.

Bertolt Brecht born 10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956, was a German poet, playwright, theatre director, and Marxist



His idea was that the characters would often step forward and narrate a scene. The set is simplistic for example if there was a bar there would be something on the lines of a simple sign that reads bar. a lot of Brectian theatre will break the 4th wall. There is a lot of gesture also used to show emotion. And all will often have a moral lesson imbedded into the performance.

 

Brecht is very different from everything I have ever done. You are not meant to be accepting it as it is you are meant to challenge it, why am I getting that water? Why am I sitting and not standing? It's meant to distance you from characters and focus you on what's actually going on.

 Me and Josh decided to use a genre which we had already usesed and the group enjoyed, and that was detectives. We set up a vague plot and the rest just attempted to make as realistic as possible while questioning everything I did. We also narrated each other as we acted. We encountered some problems along the way, for instance we had some difficulties with having to keep one eye on the other  all the time, to narrate the important things they did. This was solved quite quickly, with blocking and rehersing

Our end performance was quite good. I think we made our work Brecht style and we taught the audience. It was very interesting and I learnt allot it would be great to do Brecht at in the future.

Konstantin Sergeievich Stanislavski was born 17 January 1863 he was a Russian actor and theatre director. And creator of the well known Stanislavski method, or simply "method acting"he had a pervasive influence, especially in the period after World War II.



Stanislavski's system is a progression of techniques used to train actors and actresses to draw the audience to thierperformances. The method that was originally the concept of emotional memory for which an actor focuses internally to portray a character's emotions onstage.The technique is referred to as Stanislavski's system. The system is the result of Stanislavski's many years of efforts to determine how someone can control in performance the most intangible and uncontrollable aspects of human behavior, such as emotions.

In the week the idea was we would produce a pice of work that would have been made amd developed using the stanaslaski method.

At the start of the first lesson Miss Chambers was showing us a powerpoint on the bored showing three key feantures to the stanaslaski methord

1. What if (Use your imagination to make props feal life like for example there is a clay apple when holding it what dose it feel like or what dose it taste like?)

2.Objectives
3.How the past effected the current character

So now the opportunity arose to create our own piece of Stanislavski style work I was a 30 year old who was rather loud and his goal was to make a certain character leave his house and get the other character to stay he was acting like this as he wanted the other character to himself as they have a dungeon's and dragons night every Tuesday with just the two of them however this time the character in question brought another person who he didn't know.

My personnel response was positive as I thought of it as a great way of character building. I didn't think it would be difficult as I have already studied Stanislavski style work at my drama school.

Overall I think that the work was easy and it was good to have a rerun to refresh my memory.